Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI

The leaps forward need bloat. A startup can execute on specific vector direction way better.

Now back to your point, what did X deliver with its lean ops? It seems that it needed 2 bailouts (one from xAI, and one from space X)

If the issue is inefficiency, tons of meetings, too much team alignment etc, then that's the issue that you need to tackle, and these issues can already appear in a 50-100 employee company. Sure, that's an easy problem to solve with a smaller size but unless you hired people for no reason, these people have a very specific set of problems to tackle and are often, in these companies, the best in class to tackle them, culling half of the company isn't going to make things better.

(And X rehired part of the laid-off engineers)

You could cut Google's size by 40% and they'd still have more corporate employees than Apple.

(Google has ~190k employees, Apple has ~160k but 50k of those are retail staff, so ~110k corporate)

You mean fire the very smart people who designed the core systems AND insult them so that anyone with options would never want to work there?

We don't hear about Tom from MySpace.

Maybe Noam measures status differently.

Why? If you read a research paper for its content this is not especially important.

This thread is more about the people of course, and here we care, but that's not the point of a research paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBOXv_SFCY&t=164s

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Edit replying to below post, as I am rate limited:

> Talk about misrepresentation. Either way my comment didn't mention the legal case. I was simply pointing out that anyone working on building those types of bots is sick. They take advantage of vulnerable people, milk as much money as they can from them, and want to wash their hands of any responsibility when it eventually goes wrong.

You replied to my post, so I thought your post perhaps had some relevance to mine rather than being unrelated soapboxing.

I don't particularly agree with your soapboxing, at any rate. Character.AI was not a "relationship bot" company. Like any LLM, they could simply be prompted to respond as such, in the same way that ChatGPT can. As you pointed out yourself, ChatGPT has the same issue with people forming parasocial bonds, despite not attempting to cater to that market in any way at all. Should people who release chatbots be legally required to censor them heavily when users attempt to use them for anything other than technical questions? That seems excessive, and it seems that ascribing moral responsibility of that degree is akin to holding video game, music, or movie producers responsible for violence committed by someone who saw a piece of violent media. Moreover, how far does it go? Should distributing open-weight models be made illegal, because you're making available something that can't be censored?

Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.

- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.

You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.

- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.

It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.

It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?

The tea leaves were pretty easy to read, too; LLMs will eventually be commoditized. Once that happens, the only road to profitable AI will be paved with 1) branding and 2) cheap compute. Apple does not possess cheap inference hardware whatsoever. Their GPUs are raster-focused, inefficient and expensive for their dedicated compute role. Unless Apple crawls back to Nvidia with their tail between their legs, TPU inference was their only real option. The deal was even more obvious when you used Apple's local foundation models; they're downright eclipsed by the quality of Gemma. Once Apple Intelligence was announced, it became clear that Apple was the branding component in search of a strange bedfellow to thumb their nose at Nvidia.

> The League of Nations gave Britain mandatory power over Palestine in 1922. British rule and Arab efforts to prevent Jewish migration led to growing violence between Arabs and Jews, causing the British to announce its intention to terminate the Mandate in 1947. The UN General Assembly recommended partitioning Palestine into two states: Arab and Jewish. However, the situation deteriorated into a civil war. The Arabs rejected the Partition Plan, the Jews ostensibly accepted it, declaring the independence of the State of Israel in May 1948 upon the end of the British mandate. Nearby Arab countries invaded Palestine, Israel not only prevailed, but conquered more territory than envisioned by the Partition Plan. During the war, 700,000, or about 80% of all Palestinians fled or were driven out of territory Israel conquered and were not allowed to return, an event known as the Nakba (Arabic for 'catastrophe') to Palestinians. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing for decades, about 850,000 Jews from the Arab world immigrated ("made Aliyah") to Israel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

(To my understanding, the closest equivalent is “ummah” in Arabic, where the connotation is flipped: goy can refer to a Jewish person but typically does not, whereas the ummah typically refers to Muslim peoples as a collective but can also be a general stand-in for “nation” or “world.”)

Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't we all want to (automatically) and passively invest in a company losing billions of dollars ?

At least we can diversify our portfolio from SpaceX.

You don't know what Cursor's game plan was. Maybe acquisition was their plan.

Buying at $1 and selling for $0.1 is still viable as long as they have money in the bank, until they achieve their goals. Most startups start out that way. Even giving away their services for free.

Obviously there will be failures. Doesn't mean they have no moat. Can you say a business with 100 customers and $1000 debt is less viable than one with a single customer and no debt?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZt9YPAPZo

I'd argue that professional sport is the closest thing to a true meritocracy - doesn't matter who your Dad knows - you ability is there for all to see on the pitch.

And at the team level - if cosy cliques form, again - team performance doesn't lie - hard work, team work and talent is ultimately what delivers results on the pitch.

The other interesting part of professional sport is that the 'workers' have managed to capture more of the value than is traditionally the case - this is precisely because they are so hard to replace.

If you think professional footballers earn too much and are interchangable - feel free to try and get in the team.